Monday, April 23, 2007

The 5-kilometer-long, 3.7-meter-high concrete wall being built to contain the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiyah in Baghdad will fail, even if Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki doesn't manage to get it stopped. The US cannot cut off the head of the resistance in Iraq - simply because there is no head. Talking to the nine recently united leading Sunni Arab resistance groups would be a better idea.

By Pepe EscobarAsia Times

"......Call it the first instalment of The Baghdad gulag (Asia Times Online, April 14), apartheid in Mesopotamia, or Balkanization with Arabic subtitles.

"Suicide bombers" and/or "death squads" - whose life, according to the Pentagon, will be "more difficult" with the arrival of the gated community, have already celebrated by lobbying a few Katyusha rockets inside the walled-off area. Similarities with the wall of shame being built by Israel in the Palestinian West Bank are also to the point: no concrete wall peppered with checkpoints will be able to block the main fact that every hour in Iraq, day in, day out, there are at least seven or eight bloody bombings or attacks, 75% of them against the US occupation, 17% of them against the so-called Iraqi security forces.

The US cannot cut off the head of the (resistance) snake in Iraq - simply because there is no head: a Buddhist monk would say the snake now is one with the river itself, and it flows non-stop. Walls are irrelevant - either to the resistance or to the militias or death squads.

The surge promoted by US President George W Bush is no more - its metaphorical wall already smashed by almost 100 car and truck bombings since February, perpetrated either by strands of the Sunni Arab resistance, some more nationalistic, some more Islamic, or by al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers......"